Artillery Delay and Supression - One Post - Two Can's of Worms

[Suhiir]

First off I want to stress these are not complaints about WinSPMBT.

These are merely my observations and opinions, and like any such others will have different ones, mine are no more "right" or "wrong" then anyone else's.

I realize WinSPMBT is not a combat simulation, it's a game, and as such some things are done for the sake of playability even if they are not "realistic".
************************************************** **************

That said, I'd like to open a discussion on some aspects of the game I find "unrealistic".

Artillery
With the recent update the amount of delay caused/added to an artillery strike has been rather dramatically increased. I understand why this was done. Before it was too easy to march your artillery around the battlefield with little delay between barrages.
Problem is, in my opinion, they went a bit too far.
With the update you can adjust once, up to two (2) hexes with an added delay of 0.2 to the 0.1 for a second call for fire on the same hex giving a total 0.3 delay. A second adjustment adds 0.7 to this making the total delay 1.0.
Now many many moons ago I was an arty/air FO (USMC MP's do occasionally get training as FO's, or did in the 70's), and I've adjusted fire. Any single adjustment can be pretty much as large as you like and the total delay is the same whether it's 50m or 500. I fully understand the need to limit the size of adjustments in the game for both coding and playability reasons.

But...
Given that in the game your first strike usually scatters by 2,3, often 4 hexes it makes it basically impossible to drop artillery on a target in a "reasonable" amount of time.
It now takes two or three barrages to accomplish a single fire mission. So in effect the utility of mortars/artillery has been halved (or more) in game.

I'd like to see up to two (2) adjustments of two (2) hexes each allowed before the delay
climbs to 1.0. This is I think a reasonable compromise between playability and "reality".


Suppression
This is highly subjective, there's no way you'll ever please everyone on this matter, and I fully understand that sometimes game designers just have to "make a call"and let players deal with it as they will.

One person will claim any fire within sight/hearing will cause troops/vehicles to react less efficiently (i.e. be suppressed) and another will claim that unless it's clipping leaves over your head you really don't pay much attention to it.
Me, I think it's a matter of individuals, some folks will be suppressed by fire a thousand meters away, others won't slow down as the buttons are shot off their shirt.

Now we know unit morale and experience have some effect on the amount of suppression a unit gets from being fired on (or near). I'm sure Don or Andy could tell us the exact amount (if they cared to), but it's really irrelevant to this discussion. All that matters is units with better morale/experience get suppressed less. And a units rally rating determines if it can shake off suppression.

Problem is, the cumulative effect of many changes over the years have made suppression into the "normal" state of units.
Huh? Wha?

In the original game, wayyyyy back when...if a unit was fired on it got suppressed. There was little to no effect on nearby units.
Then they added that units in the same hex got suppressed as well. Makes sense to me.
Then someone said; Hey, even if you're not the unit being fired on an explosion by an RPG near you will cause you to duck. So non-artillery/bomb explosions in adjacent hexes started causing suppression.
Then another person said; Ya know, a machinegun or AGL hitting nearby isn't going to encourage you to stick your head up either. Nearby defined as an adjacent hex. OK, 50m is fairly close so I can see that.

Where the game originally had basically one source of suppression from fire (I'm not including artillery/bombs here cause their effect are basically unchanged) we now have three, two of which are area-effect.

Problem is...the values for unit morale and recovery were based on the amount of suppression generated by a single source - getting directly shot at.

Now I can't speak for everyone (and wouldn't try if I could) but I'm finding that I can't recover from the amounts of suppression being generated well/fast enough to keep a battle going. I commonly have situations where so many of my "front line" units are suppressed, retreating, routed I can't press an attack - or maintain a defense.

Some will say "good", this is how it should be. Military units are rarely physically destroyed but rather their morale is broken. And this is true.

I know we can (and I'll freely admit I do) adjust the Rout/Rally ratings in the games preferences. But should this be "necessary" to allow you to play?

From my tests I've found that setting the Rout/Rally rating to 130% seems to give "reasonable" recovery rates. Given that unit rally ratings tend to be in the 45-65 range this makes them effectively 60-85.

So my proposal is since there are now more, and larger, sources of suppression unit rally ratings should be increased by some amount (around 25%) to get "back" to the same effectiveness they had when they were originally set up.
************************************************** **************

Feel free to add your two cents to this everyone, the whole point is to discuss the issue.